The Planning Board gave two large housing developments the green light Tuesday, both of which are on Jersey City waterfronts. One was a 34-story retail and hotel/residential complex near the Grove Street PATH station, and the other was a 14-unit housing complex on Sip Avenue near the Hackensack River.
In approving preliminary site plans, the board said the projects will invigorate city neighborhoods that have fallen into disrepair.
The 34-story complex will rise across from the Grove Street PATH station. It got preliminary approval by the board after the project’s engineer and structural and landscape architects gave reports on the progress of the structure’s planning. Before construction begins, however, the architects need to hammer out construction documents with the city’s building department, city planning staff said.
Being developed by Jamm Realty Trust, a subsidiary of the Bridgewater-based development firm Schenkman-Kushner, the project will hopefully begin construction as early as the spring. It will take approximately 18 months to two years to complete, Jamm Realty Trust principal Jeffrey Persky said Tuesday.
Bordered by Newark Avenue, Marin Boulevard and Morgan and Grove streets, the building makes up the entirety of the Grove Street Station II Redevelopment Plan first approved by the Planning Board in March. Covering about 70,000 square feet of land in one of the city’s most bustling Downtown areas, the complex will consist of 525 market-rate apartments, 170 hotel rooms, an enclosed parking structure and 18,000 square feet of retail space facing Newark Avenue and Marin Boulevard.
In addition, the developer will redesign the area surrounding the PATH station, creating what landscape designer Thomas Bauer said was a contiguous public space that will serve simultaneously as a park, shopping district corridor and transportation artery.
City planning staff said the overall project, as it was presented, adheres to all the plan’s major requirements, which were intended to capitalize on the area’s strengths.
“That whole area is important,” Supervising Planner Marianne Bucci-Carter said Thursday. “It’s a major transportation hub of the city and it’s right next to both a historic and shopping district.”
“And the public areas will get improved at the same time,” Bucci-Carter added. “And from that, we think a lot of other things will occur – the tenants, the hotel guests and the more people living and shopping in that neighborhood. There’s just a host of benefits that will come from that area.”
The city’s initial plans for the redevelopment, however, were quite different from what was presented to the public Tuesday. Architect Peter DeWitt said he was at first instructed to design a large office complex for the site, but DeWitt said city planners and neighborhood residents changed their minds after Sept. 11 and instead opted for a residential space.
“We thought it would be more stimulating to the community to have residences there,” DeWitt explained to the Reporter in March. “With offices you would just have people going in and out. Residents would help create more prosperity in the area.”
DeWitt said Wednesday that in crafting the building’s design, he was primarily constrained by how the structure would fit into the neighborhood’s pre-existing context.
“Everyone hated the Mack-Cali building [across the street], so we knew that was something to avoid,” DeWitt said. “We decided on red brick with off-white trim, which is a classic, 19th century color scheme. Also, we’re using different brick colors to define and articulate the different volumes of the building.”
On the west, the building will begin level with the 19th century building at Grove Street and Newark Avenue, otherwise known as the Guarini building because of its present owner. It will gradually rise as it moves eastward to Marin Boulevard, with the hotel occupying 12 stories and the residential unit consisting of 34 floors.
“There’s going to one million square feet of space [in that building],” DeWitt said. “We had to try to fit a behemoth like that into the [smaller] context.”
DeWitt, a University of Pennsylvania-trained architect who also designed Hoboken’s 333 River St. building, said the building serves as an appropriate transition from the office towers on the waterfront to the low-rise buildings and residential brownstones in Downtown’s interior sections.
“We’re incorporating unique building forms,” DeWitt said of the stepped design and brick façade. “It’s going to be very contextual. A lot of high rises, once you get above the ground floor, are always the same until the top, where they do a funny crown. This design gives it scale and makes it look nicer.”
Board member Jeni Branum asked if the developer was going to retain public parking on Morgan Street, to which Persky responded that there was no intention to remove street parking other than where loading trucks and cars enter the complex. Branum also suggested that a dog run be included on the property if the developer was considering making the building pet-friendly.
West Side luxury Prospective tenants were also a major concern to the West Side residents present when Jersey City native Charles Groeschke presented site plans for a three-family housing complex at Sip, Logan and Emerson avenues. Residents said they fear that the complex, which will be comprised of what attorney Ira Starr enthusiastically described as “the only truly legal three-family” homes in the area, will instead be rented out as low-income housing.
Logan Avenue resident Janice Prucker, whose home would be enveloped by the complex once it’s built, said her property value would be reduced to nothing if Groeschke’s development turned into project housing. Starr, however, assured everyone present the homes would be sold at more than $400,000 each, a price he said was in a range obviously out of what can be loosely defined as low-income.
After reviewing architectural details, the board voted unanimously to approve the project, offering their good wishes that the developer – who has developed other successful projects in the area – succeeds in his project.
“This is certainly going to be an A++ plan for the area,” board commissioner and Jersey City Councilwoman Mary Donnelly said.